as a way to conduct systematic quantitative content analysis on the show's presentation of the American presidency. The authors do a nice job of explaining framing theory in general and as it is applied to analyses of the media, conducting a thorough and well presented literary history. As they note, a frame "represents the 'basic elements' that define a social situation according to a set of 'principles of organization'" (506). They further explain that when a frame is applied to the media, it represents the central organizing idea that gives the particular situation being watched some understood and thus recognizable context for the audience. Or, in other words, a frame is the way that which a given story is organized that provides the audience with some overall meaning. When applied to political communications, the authors posit that framing studies can be placed into four main categories: framing building; frame setting; individual-level framing effects; and audience studies of journalists. They then assert that some authors in the literature have called for an integration of these different lines of research in order "to better understand the process of media framing as a substantive whole, and to also properly distinguish framing from other theories that dominate the empirical study of political communication" (507). This is important, because it serves the authors purpose in providing some context for why their particular study is needed. They also note that all the recent works in the field of political communication framing research have focused on news-media analyses. This is problematic, acco
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